Ralph

I am spiritually a country person, brought up as a ‘Shropshire lad’ in England. I don’t like materialism and the benefits of city living are secondary. But, damn it all, I love ballet, technology, theater, research, art, discovery too. How do I manage all this? I don’t! My life has been a series opportunistic leaps, based on how I felt at the time. It started when I was 15. The local vicar suggested I might be interested in working on a small farm which was run single handed by a parishioner. It ended up by me working on farms every free time I had until I graduated from university when I was 23. I was almost persuaded to go to the local agricultural university, Harper Adams University, and make a career of it. Instead, I graduated from Birmingham University Medical School knowing much more about farming than medicine having had many very responsible periods running farms as locum tenens when owners’ families were on holiday.

I was incredibly shy as a child and that I am still very much a loner, but I do listen to what people tell me and closely observe what people do. I am a spy, everything interests me and I try to store knowledge and use in my imaginary world and then see how it applies in reality. I have followed my imaginary world throughout my life. I wanted to be an academic like the professor in Rupert Bear stories, following my interest in everything. But my interest in science (forensic and futuristic) was kindled by Sherlock Holmes and Dan Dare. My eventual career choice of medicine was guided by my splendid school headmaster, chemistry and biology teachers. Studying medicine was the onerous but best way for me to go. During my medical studies I changed my interests from forensic medicine to surgery (deciding that doing something for the living was more important), to psychiatry/psychology (what makes people think differently – an interest much influenced by women), to general medicine (far more interestingly varied than surgery) and finally, therapeutics (such exciting developments with new drugs and surgical techniques, but all having risks for some as well as benefits). I added toxicology to the latter since the risks as well as the benefits of chemicals to agriculture and industry were beginning to be taken seriously.

In my late teenage, I finally was affected by testosterone and started to take an interest in people outside my small village community, primarily women. I was amazed to find that there were people who did not talk about sport all the time, the weather, or agriculture (though I did really get the interest in agriculture as an important topic). The gentle wisdom, power and determination of girlfriends, two wives, and nurses in hospital has slowly taught me more and more about what love and life really means, and it is way beyond biological drive. The meaning of life is not only in personal fulfillment, though that is important, it is in the commitment that humans must have to each other for empathy, justice, compassion care that we all must have for both all people and for the Earth (see Terry Eagleton’s wonderful book, ‘The Meaning of Life’).

In some ways I have not changed my general thinking since I was a teenager. I have adopted my father’s saying, that he was “a hopeful cynic, that the journey is often more useful and happier than the destination”. I think that I am much more forgiving and empathetic than he was though. These traits have been tempered by degrees in my absolute determination to see medicine as a ‘calling’ as it used to be described. People with a calling are different because of very unusual and profound experiences they have of people and the world around them – in medicine both wonderful and awful, in the true sense of those words. I have had the privilege of doing both practice and research that has made desperately ill people whole again mentally and physically as well as seeing the dreadful consequences of disease war, corruption and errors leading to suffering and deaths that could have been averted. This has made me a very critical person, and my personal mantra is to say that ‘I don’t trust anybody fully, and certainly not myself’. This does not mean that I don’t take chance and risks, but I’m very careful about doing so, perhaps infuriatingly slow! Nor does it mean that I am not a happy person, in fact it means that I enjoy the complexity and opportunities life offers.

I have ended up with a lot of letters after my name, but the one I treasure most is a rare honorary DSc from Benin University in Nigeria in recognition of my work in Africa. To think of me, a country lad being recognized at all in another continent is beyond my wildest imaginings I like to think that in my 78^th year I am a little wiser than when I started. I now like to add philosophy to my list of interests. Trying to understand how we should think about the Universe and the myriad of infinitely complex interacting items and issues that come into human knowledge, and that require evaluation, interpretation, understanding and action of some sort is at the heart of everything. The world and living becomes beautiful if one fully understands the bad and deals with it, takes comfort in the good, and revels in the best where everyone gains something.